From Paris With Love

There are stupid action movies that are delightful and others that are irritating, and often just a thin line separates the two.

The best ones cater to an audience's appreciation of the obvious. Such movies are vigorously stupid, energetically stupid and surprisingly manipulative: Often, things get so engrossing that the audience forgets to laugh. Movies like these assume that viewers are not pushovers but rather intelligent connoisseurs of grand action-movie stupidity.

Watch the trailer for the movie "From Paris With Love."

Media: San Francisco Chronicle

"From Paris With Love" is not that kind of action movie. Instead of including the audience in on the joke, it offers second-rate goods and then tries to slip them by us. It was directed by Pierre Morel, whose previous film was "Taken," also a stupid action movie, but one made by intelligent people for an intelligent audience. "From Paris With Love," by contrast, is in search of viewers who really don't care what they're looking at. A few flashing lights, a guy playing the kazoo - anything might do the trick.

It would be pointless to try to figure out the motives that made John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers make this movie. All we can do is assess the damage: Rhys Meyers plays a low-level diplomat in Paris, who is also working as a petty functionary for the CIA. One of the first things we see him do is plant a bug in a French minister's office. It's a morally dubious act at best, one typical of lazy action-movie writing. Muddled morality has no place in a movie that aspires to be light, fast and fun.

In any case, everything else is just a prologue to the arrival of John Travolta, sporting a shaved head as Wax, supposedly the CIA's best agent. Wax is a hothead, and Travolta throws himself into the role with comic abandon. His energy is admirable, and his comic timing pumps up a dull script. But this Travolta-as-wild-man thing is a familiar trope, and to see it carted out in such a mediocre movie is disheartening. You are guaranteed to enjoy "From Paris With Love" if the notion of watching Travolta shooting people - or beating them up in slow motion as heavy metal plays - sounds like a great time at the movies.

Holes in the script, overwrought camera work, dialogue that's embarrassing, and a plot device that's obvious 10 minutes into the movie - all these are major problems. Yet every one of these things could have been forgiven, if only the filmmakers had remembered to do the essential thing, which is to give these guys one good reason to be doing what they're doing. An audience will accept mass carnage from a father who is, for example, trying to rescue his daughter from white-slave traffickers. But in this film, the wacky agent is killing people because he likes it, and his young partner is just standing there because he wants a promotion.

The movie's only possible source of strong emotion, the romance between the diplomat and his fiancee, is pushed to the side and then rendered ridiculous. "She never talked about her life," he says, describing their relationship, "and I never thought to ask." That's very uncurious, for a CIA agent. The fiancee, by the way, is played by Kasia Smutniak, a Polish actress who works mostly in Italy.

Then again, maybe this whole review has been unnecessary. Maybe just one thing needed to be said to convey the movie's staleness and lack of inspiration. Guess the Travolta character's favorite Parisian dish? A Royale With Cheese. You know, just like the character he played in "Pulp Fiction." "Pulp" was a riff on Travolta's screen identity, but when filmmakers start riffing on a riff, that's pure desperation.